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Americans won’t choose a president who chides them.
“I no longer believe that there is a moral majority.
As Hillary Clinton campaigns for a New York Senate seat, she’d do well to study the career of another effective outsider.
New Yorkers knew they were in for a long, hot summer this year when Hillary Rodham Clinton made an early political foray into their state and was greeted by demonstrators whom the state GOP had urged to dress up as blackflies. One of Mrs.
Smarter than stupid, of course, but does the intellectual tradition that began with the century suggest that there's such a thing as being too smart for the country’s good?
When mudslinging in Congress led to actual bloodshed
Our recent politics have brought the editorial handwringers out in force, decrying a new outbreak of “partisanship,” as when, at the end of the impeachment process, The New York Times declared that “Americans yearn for a Congress that ca
William Jefferson Clinton, Andrew Johnson, and the judgment of history
When the 105th Congress took a pre-election recess last October, the House of Representatives had already made itself a place in the record books by resolving, for the second time in a quarter of a century and only the third in the nation’s experience, to hold hearings on the p
The head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee explains why it has always frustrated presidents, and why it doesn’t have to.
… or why campaign-finance reform never succeeds in America ...
In the summer of 1787, a sweaty group of politicians was debating the clauses of a proposed constitution in humid Philadelphia.
You've always heard that Harding was the worst president. Sex in the White House. Bribes on Capitol Hill. Was he really that bad?
Americans have been invading one another’s privacy for political gain since before the Revolution.
Everyone following the recent White House sex scandal must have felt the uneasy mixture of titillation and guilt that is always present when reading other people’s mail or eavesdropping on a private conversation.
His grandmother wanted him to be crowned emperor in Paris; he didn’t want anything to do with his royal background.
No less the Corsican clansman than the French military genius, Napoleon the Great saw himself as the eminence of a family of rulers placed by his armies atop thrones, his brothers made kings—Joseph in Spain, Louis in Holland—his sister Caroline the queen of Naples, other relati
AN ANNIVERSARY LOOK BACK AT THE BIGGEST PRESIDENTIAL SCANDAL EVER, THROUGH THE CHANGES IT WROUGHT IN THE LANGUAGE
Many of us had ghastly wounds or missing limbs from shrapnel, bullets, or fire. “I know just how you boys feel,” the president announced.
In 1965, I spent eight months at Bethesda Naval Hospital recovering from shrapnel wounds and two broken legs received in Vietnam. One day that fall, our corpsmen announced that some of us were to be wheel-chaired to a meeting with the president of the United States. Lyndon B.
I had a special reason for covering myself with Alf Landon campaign buttons.
It was the fall of 1936, and students at West Grammar School in Portland, Maine were excited. Alf Landon was coming to Portland! Mr. Landon was running for president against Franklin Roosevelt.
Bill Clinton is having a rocky second term. But so has almost every president who made it back into office.
The uproar that erupted only a few weeks after President Clinton’s 1997 inauguration when news of his personal involvement in Democratic fundraising activities came to light made it clear that his second term was off to a bumpy start.
For generations, Americans reserved their most fervent “landmark reverence” for those rooms that could boast that George Washington— not Abraham Lincoln—slept here.
“You know who Nebuchadnezzar was, don’t you?” Truman asked.
I was a young reporter in Chicago on the day in 1956 that Harry Truman turned the tables on me. He gave me the most memorable interview of my reporting career, but I was too embarrassed to turn it in to my editor.
A VETERAN JOURNALIST reflects on how public discourse has been tarnished by the press’s relentless war against presidents, including his own biggest offense.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, A HARD-FOUGHT gubernatorial campaign heralded the third great political upheaval of our century.
IT WAS A FUNERAL TO REMEMBER. The rain had been pelting for hours when the mourners gathered in St.
A century ago this fall, voters were at one another’s throats in one of the hardest-fought campaigns ever.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan,
Bryan, Candidate for president who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American Poet who could sing outdoors…
New legislation means to bring lobbyists out into the sunlight. History suggests they’ll bask there.
I am always a little dubious of unanimous votes like the 421-0 landslide by which the House of Representatives passed a bill to regulate lobbying at the tail end of 1995.
The great emancipator and the liberator of Kuwait get together in the newest White House portrait.
Healy
Seen in its proper historical context, amid the height of the Cold War, the investigation into Kennedy’s assassination looks much more impressive and its shortcomings much more understandable.
He looked just as you always remembered him. There was that trim, dapper stance, the black hair sleek against the head, the signature black mustache. Unmistakably Thomas E. Dewey. The man who couldn’t lose the 1948 presidential election and nonetheless did.
A historian of American portraits tells how he determines whether a picture is authentic and why that authenticity matters.
More than any other features, our faces are what mark us as unique individuals. Superficially our faces are who we are. Together with names they identify us with the lives we have lived; they are our perpetual calling cards.
A look at the very small group of powerful and effective men who are Newt Gingrich’s truest models
It is not easy to be non-partisan about a confrontational politician like Newt Gingrich, but I think it’s reasonably objective to say that he has elevated the job of Speaker of the House to a level of visibility that is rare in its two centuries of existence.
In the classic “oral biography” of Harry Truman, many of the president’s most trenchant assertions may simply have been invented.
The story as Harry S. Truman told it was pretty good, even for that eminent storyteller.
The English writer G. K. Chesterton once observed that journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is dead” to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.
What do the stunning Republican victories in the recent election mean? The answer may lie a century in the past.
In the immediate aftermath of last November’s election, I was overtaken by a kind of awe as I contemplated this month’s column. “Clearly,” said an inner voice, “this is a historic event. Say something of historical consequence!
Three new studies offer important glimpses into a subject whose significance never dwindles.
The newspaperman Noah Brooks knew Abraham Lincoln well before he became president and grew so close to him during his time in Washington that he was being considered as a replacement for one of the president’s secretaries at the time of the assassination.
An interview with Bill and Hillary Clinton
On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House.